CNI Board elects Harriet Fulbright as Chair, David Newton as Vice-Chair
Posted December 11, 2009
December 11, 2009
Washington, DC– The Council for the National Interest (CNI) is delighted to announce that Harriet Mayor Fulbright has been elected Chair and Amb. David Newton Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors.
Mrs. Fulbright is President of the J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center here in Washington DC. In May 2009, she took part in a CNI Foundation study tour of six Middle Eastern countries. She and the other tour members met many Arab and Israeli political figures and undertook the onerous trip from Cairo to Gaza, where they viewed the extensive destruction inflicted by Israel during last winter’s war.
Mrs. Fulbright said she is concerned that Gaza’s people have still not been allowed to rebuild the homes and businesses destroyed during the war. She said she is eager to join the rest of CNI’s leadership in working for fairer, more inclusive US policies in the Middle East that can bring security, dignity, and hope to all the region’s peoples.
Harriet Mayor Fulbright has spent most of her adult life in the fields of education and the arts. From 1997 until 2000 she was the Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, whose mission is to enhance cultural life in America. Prior to that, she served as “Unofficial Ambassador” for the 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program
Over the last decade she has undertaken lecture tours to countries in four continents, where she has spoken on such topics as the vital role of international education exchanges, the importance of arts education, the life of Senator J. William Fulbright, September 11th and its impact, and life as a cancer patient.
She earned her BA from Radcliffe College and an MFA from the George Washington University. She shared with her late husband a dedication to the search for peaceful solutions to conflicts throughout the world.
Ambassador (retired) David Newton served the U.S. for over 36 years in a Foreign Service career that included assignments as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Yemen, and a three-year secondment to the faculty of the National Defense University. From 1998 through 2004 he was the first director of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Iraq, based in Prague.
CNI welcomes Mrs. Fulbright and Amb. Newton to the Board as we continue to work for the kind of fair-minded U.S. policies in the Middle East that are consistent with American values, protect our national interests, and contribute to a just solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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The Council for the National Interest is a 501 (c) 4 non-profit, non-partisan grassroots organization that advocates a much more even-handed U.S. role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. CNI’s sister organization, the Council for the National Interest Foundation, is a 501 (c) 3 (tax-deductible) organization that does public education work around these issues.
